


The void is calling

by cutebutpsyco



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Divergence - Spider-Man: Far From Home, Do Not Copy On Other Sites, Gen, Panic Attacks, Protective Tony Stark, Tony Stark Has Panic Attacks, Tony Stark acting as Peter's mentor, Tony Stark is alive, inspitarions has been a bitch recently, so sorry for the quality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:21:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27103381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cutebutpsyco/pseuds/cutebutpsyco
Summary: “Has the circus come to town or what?” He couldn't help himself asking while looking at the man.The man shrugged before turning his weird head up at him. “Always the same, Stark, aren’t you?”That very same sentence hit way differently than he could have ever imagined. He didn’t care about the person in front of him, all he was focusing on was that one of the heat sources he saw inside of the building was Peter and that was the only thing that mattered to him. But that sentence was way weirder than he thought it would have been the first thing the voice who invited him in an abandoned airport near Prague said to him.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	The void is calling

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to stolenavanlche on tumblr for their prompt:  
>  _I had this idea for a fic where there are 100 Peter Parkers in the room. Tony has to find the real Peter Parker before times runs out or he dies. Thats honestly as far as my idea goes. If you would be so kind to tag stolenavalanche on Tumblr when you post, I would be grateful_
> 
> I'm having a hard time coming to terms with my muse so I'm sorry if it's not as good as always, I tried my best and decided to punch my inspiration because otherwise it would have taken forever and I don't really want to make people wait so long. Hope you'll enjoy this. As always, I've tried to make this as canon-like as possible and this is the reason why Mysterio is in it and, yes, the end is ambiguous on purpose. 
> 
> As always, nothing belongs to me, the title is from Starlight by Starset (I blame my friends from introducing me to this band).

Tony was sure that he could tell if there was something wrong simply walking into a room. It was something that he wasn’t proud of at all, especially when he was sure that it was because of his anxiety. He could tell if something was going to fall against his shoulders and he could take in all the possible ways out of it.  
It was something he found himself doing even before Afghanistan, but after being abducted he found himself indulging more and more in the same train of thought. He needed to know how to prevent the worst things that could happen on his way, he needed to find a way to save himself and all the people inside of a room, but, most importantly, not being forced into a place from where he couldn’t run. 

Which was why he felt like he didn’t really need to cross the door of the penthouse main room. He couldn’t tell what he was scared to see at the other side of it, it was his home, even if having its name high in the sky caused a lot of paparazzi to crowd at the entrance. Nobody ever tried to enter in the last decade or so, and he knew Friday would have informed him if somebody trespassed. So he just tried not to think about that weird feeling that Tony was sure never gasped at his lungs while he walked into the tower. 

The door of the elevator swung open and Tony stepped back, dread taking the place of that weird feeling the moment he saw what was standing in front of him. He let his whiskey brown eyes run on the weirder thing he had ever seen and then tried to take a step back as if retreating into the elevator and doing something, he didn’t even know what. What was even more anxiety-inducing was that the show which was opening in front of him wasn’t a threat he could fight with his suit. Because it didn’t matter what, he would never use his weapons against the person, or, better, people, who was in front of them. 

All he could do was stare, confusion and fear mixing together and speechless. In front of him, there were three perfect copies of one of the people that meant the most for Tony: Peter Parker, big chocolate brown eyes and ruffled hair, and confusion clear on his three faces. 

“Mr Stark…?” One of the Peters asked, and Tony would have wanted to repeat once again that he didn’t have to call him Mr Stark, that Tony was better, or any other stupid thing he repeated over and over again, but he couldn’t, not at that moment. “Are you real?”

Which, well, if somebody had to answer that question, the person was Peter, not Tony considering that he just walked into his home, but still, that was a point to make on another occasion. He looked at the teenagers in front of him trying to understand if it was Friday’s doing, but there was nothing to give away the fact that the three pairs of chocolate brown eyes were holograms. No, they seemed to be extremely real, and breathing, and living. But how was that even possible?

“Yes, I am,” He answered, even if he wasn’t sure that it was the right thing to do, he wasn’t even sure that he was real, that anything in front of him was. “What’s happening?”

Tony tried to focus himself on the Peter who was in front of him but could see something in the eyes of any of them, something at which he didn’t think about first and now that he was thinking about it was starting to be evident. Something that he had seen in the kid’s eyes just a couple of times before fear. 

“I don’t know… I thought… This must be an illusion,” One of the other two Peters said, and a moment later he turned as if to look at his backs, waiting for something to come. So, Tony wasn’t the only one who thought about the illusion thing, he wasn’t surprised by this, though: the kid was smart, it didn't matter how many of him was around. But he also seemed to know more about that. 

“What do you mean?” He asked, his eyes going too to the door behind the teenager who just spoke. A moment later, it opened revealing another perfect copy of the Spider-Kid walking inside and stopping dead on track when he took in the presence of the billionaire inside of the main room. Tony’s eyes didn’t know where to focus, everything around him seemed to have taken the face of Peter and those chocolate brown eyes were wide open as if he was trying to look at everything and everywhere at the same time. It wasn’t a look Stark liked to see on his protegé’s face. Something that he promised himself would have never let Peter fear. It was the same light in the eyes Peter had on the battlefield when Tony snapped his fingers. Pure fear, and uncertainty. 

“I don’t know! I don’t know anymore, it's just…” Tony nodded, hating to see Peter so upset, let alone four of them. He was the adult, he was supposed to be the one to give him all the safety he could provide, he was supposed to be the one to always have the answer and help the kid, and that he could do. 

“Ok, you said you think I am an illusion, right?” He asked while he was pretty sure to be real and there, standing in front of him. The Peter who just walked into the room nodded. “Do you know what or who could have caused it?”

A part of Tony didn’t want to know the answer to that question, because he knew, or better suspected, what it could have been. Magic. And he fucking hated magic! He always had, and it was only because it was something he couldn’t understand yet, but because every encounter he always had with magic just turned out to be a fucking mess. It didn’t matter what Strange was trying to do, it didn’t matter that the doctor was spending more and more time with him, working for Stark Med and trying to make him understand that magic and science could mix, it didn’t matter because, at the end of the day, magic was still and incognita, something Tony couldn’t really understand and therefore a potential threat. 

“Mysterio,” Came to the answer, in a thin voice. Tony looked at him, trying to understand if he already heard that name before. He tried not to think about the fact that it sounded a lot like the name of a porno star because there was something in the tone Peter’s used to scare him. 

“And who the hell is this guy?” He asked, instead of saying what was crossing his mind, because it was the responsible thing to do. 

“I don’t know…” Peter’s voice was thin as if he was feeling guilty for not knowing an answer for that. “He helped me, and then, he didn’t anymore. He said that if you care, you would understand, but not to set my hopes too high.”

Tony looked at the Peter who just spoke. He had no idea what that sentence meant and didn’t even know about what he should have cared about. But what he knew was that when people started to drag Peter in their mess, they were as good as dead for Tony Stark, and if they dared to hurt the kid, well, they would have been dead at the end of the week. It wasn’t even about being superheroes, it was about defending the people he cared about. 

“Friday?” He asked, because if there was something that could help him to understand that was his AI. Or, at least, that was that Tony hoped. 

“Yes, Boss,” The voice answered a moment later. Before answering her question, though, there was something Tony needed to know, something to understand at least a little bit of what was going on. So he turned to look at the four Peters in front of him and said: “How many of you are around here?”

They all seemed to look at each other as if trying to understand to answer him or if trying to agree on a single answer, the billionaire couldn’t tell and wasn’t even sure about which of his intuition he would have preferred. But before he could make that decision at least one of the young men in front of him spoke: “That’s the entire point, Mr Stark, we don’t know, it’s six of us in the Tower but... “

The kid started to chew at his bottom lips, and Tony was trying to think about something to cheer him up when his phone started to buzz. He checked the caller ID and when it revealed to be an unknown caller he thought about doing what he usually did in that situation: ignore the call. But he knew he couldn’t at that moment. He couldn’t even tell why it probably was just an intuition dictated by the numerous years he spent as Iron Man. He knew that answering that phone call could provide more information than the ones he was having by speaking with the Peters in front of him. 

“Stark,” He answered. For some instants, all he could hear at the other side of the line was a long silence, then a male voice which, Tony supposed, belonged to the man Peter told him about. 

“I imagine you already met my little gift,” The man said, and Tony hated how he seemed to imply the six copies of Peter currently in the tower could be considered a gift, not when all he could see in their eyes was pure fear. “Peter there, he’s so sure you’d do everything to save him, I beg to differ,” A cold laugh and Tony found himself questioning how could this Mysterio man pretend to know him, even in the slightest. 

“What do you want?” Tony asked, and tried to keep the tone of his voice even not to upset even more the Peters in front of him. 

“Just to play a game,” The man laughed. “I have Peter, the real one. I’m sending you my coordinates, bring the little gifts I left with you, we are going to have fun. And, of course, you call your friends, and he dies.”

Tony froze. The idea of a person, he supposed was the Mysterio guy one of the Peters told him about, having captured Peter was something that he dreaded since the moment he met the kid. He was a smart teen, but he was too trusting and people tended to use that to their advantage. And that was the worse thing that could happen to someone like Peter himself. Tony never had such a paternal instinct, and he felt like it wasn’t only because of his own father, but when he met Peter things started to change. He called Harley short after the Civil War, tried to sort things out with the other teen and was happy that the boy from Tennessee understood him. He was getting better at the mentoring thing, but that didn’t mean that he would have left one of his kids in the hands of someone who could harm them. Quite the opposite. He was going to bring hell broke loose on whoever tried to do that much. 

\--

“Boss, we are landing,” Friday’s voice woke him up from his unintentional staring at the six perfect copies of Peter. He wanted to ask them what would have happened once he’d kick Mysterio’s ass and get back his own Peter, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have any idea how the man could produce multiple copies of the same person, and the billionaire wasn’t even sure he would like to know. 

He nodded, even if he knew his AI couldn’t see him and then leaned over to look outside from the window of his jet. Apparently, the location chosen by the idiot who wanted to get killed before asking any kind of question was near an abandoned airport. Which meant that the man knew Tony enough to know how he would arrive. Not that it mattered, at that moment. Pretty much everyone knew that Tony Stark could fly everywhere he wanted to in the beat of the eyes, either with his suit or his jet. Whoever that Mysterio was, didn’t need a lot of homework to do, but the place definitely seemed to be something coming from a horror movie and Tony already hated the man’s guts. 

“Does Halloween arrive earlier in Europe?” He asked, do nobody in particular, his whiskey brown eyes running to the abandoned building in front of him. 

“Technically Halloween doesn’t arrive in Europe, it’s an American tradition,” A young voice corrected him, and Tony couldn’t help but smile while turning toward one of the Peters that was now jogging down from the stairs of the jet. He shook his head and let the others walk by before telling the pilot to wait for them there. Hopefully, it wouldn’t take long, but just to be sure he tapped on his Arc Reactor and waited for the suit to form around him before scanning the building. 

What he didn’t expect was to find ninety-five different sources of heat inside of it. He stopped, moving his arm as to protect the six teenagers who were with him and moved some steps toward what seemed to be the closest entrance to the place. Before he could step further, though, a green cloud of smoke materialized in front of him. Something in the depths of Tony’s brain suggested to him that it was magic and his first attempt was to aim one of the suit repulsors at the greenish fog which took, a moment later, the shape of a man with a… fishbowl for head?! 

“Has the circus come to town or what?” He couldn't help himself asking while looking at the man. 

The man shrugged before turning his weird head up at him. “Always the same, Stark, aren’t you?” 

That very same sentence hit way differently than he could have ever imagined. He didn’t care about the person in front of him, all he was focusing on was that one of the heat sources he saw inside of the building was Peter and that was the only thing that mattered to him. But that sentence was way weirder than he thought it would have been the first thing the voice who invited him in an abandoned airport near Prague said to him. 

“What do you mean?” He asked, trying to shield with his body the six teenagers behind him. 

“You don’t even remember, do you? How long would it have taken you to realize it wasn’t the real Peter if I just sent back one of the copies? I should have thought about it before. Doesn’t matter now,” Tony didn’t know the man, but he could tell he was smiling even without him seeing his face through the smoky weird that he was wearing. 

“Where is the kid?!” He asked instead, knowing far too well that he wasn’t going to get any answer if he just blasted the shit out of the man standing in front of him. He didn’t even pay attention to his attire, but it looked like he was in front of a cosplayer unsure if being Tony himself or Thor and decided to throw a bit of the irritating wizard from the Village in it just for the drama. He would have appreciated, on any other occasion, but not when that person was keeping Peter under his power. 

The man scoffed and then turned just to walk away toward the entrance in a way which didn’t meet Tony’s expectation considering that previous show he put on before. “Follow me, if you want to see him.”

Tony turned to focus on the six Peters who were behind him and then said: “You wait for us there, not moving, not going around, nothing at all.”

At that, the man laughed. “Oh no, they have to follow us.”

Tony froze, stopped on his feet and tried to find a way for having at least the teens safe. He could work with that, but following that man inside what seemed to appear a building filled with unknown enemies with six Peters behind him, that was nothing he would have wanted to do. Because he knew that the kids would have been in danger, and it didn’t even matter that neither of them was the real Spider-Man. They were still frightened copies of his kid. And the best he could do, in that situation, was to try to protect them. He nodded, turning to look at each of the pair of chocolate browns staring at him. They seemed to be worried, but not as much as they were in the Tower, and that was good enough. 

“Ok, stay behind me, though,” He said and started to follow that Mysterio man inside of the building having Friday to map every hallway and corner they crossed. He had no idea where they were, but after a while, his AI provided him with an entire map of the place and he could tell they were heading toward the old security gates of the airport. The place where the heat sources he detected before were coming from. He looked at the man, raising his repulsor and not even trying to speak. He didn’t seem to be the man to provide answers to the questions he might have, and Tony didn’t even want to. He could have, on any other occasion, but the man had Peter and the only thing Stark wanted was to get him and break the stupid fishbowl. 

What he didn’t expect, though, was to cross the doors of the security area to be faced with more and more pairs of chocolate brown eyes and the same confused and scared faces. 

“Peter?” He called, surprise streaming through his voice. The man who was walking by his side smirked, this time making disappear the stupid thing he was wearing over his face and, only then, Tony recognized him. 

“Becks?!” He asked, ignoring the fact that it was the last face he’d ever thought he would have seen behind the glass globe he used as ahead. 

“Oh, you remember?! That’s even funnier, then,” The man answered, and Tony just wanted to punch the man’s face and knock his stupid smirk off it. “The kid said you would have come, but we both know you don’t care, not about him and not about anyone else.”

“That’s not true,” Tony had no idea why his former employer was doing that to him, but it didn’t matter, what he hated was the idea of Peter hearing that. It was a blatant lie, but it hasn’t been, not in the past. And Stark hated the idea of that kid seeing the person he had once been. Peter deserved better, and while Tony hated the idea of the kid seeing him as a hero, he didn’t even want for him to be disappointed once more. 

“You have one hour to prove it, Stark. Find the real Peter Parker, or he’ll die,” And, with another cloud of fog, the asshole disappeared. Tony looked at the empty spot where the other man had been before and just couldn’t understand why someone would do that. Which was the point, why would him…? He had to save Peter, he had to find him and all those kids looking at him, he just couldn’t focus. He tried to focus, tried to look at what was in front of him, tried to do something which wasn’t seeing the entire world spinning around him. He could do that, he knew Peter he just had to… To find a way to understand. Or the kid would have died. 

He stepped back, the suit retreating from his body without him even asking it and his back hit the wall behind him. He crouched down, and a cacophony of “Mr Stark” did nothing to help him. It was too much, it was something he couldn’t do, not when everyone was looking at him, not everyone was expecting from him to do something. 

He could hear the beat of his heart in his eyes, and he knew each of those was a second, a second spent not finding the real Peter, a second closer to the kid’s death. He couldn’t waste any more time. It didn’t matter how difficult it was to breathe for him, it didn’t matter how everything seemed so slow and too fast in front of his eyes, it didn’t matter because none of these things could help Peter. He pushed himself up and started to walk through the concerned clones. 

“Ok, you have to help me out,” He said, a whisper which Tony hoped was heard by everyone in the room. “I’m gonna ask you something…”

\--

“Mr Stark?!” A soft voice reached him through the buzzing in his ears. He tried to focus on it, tried to see through the confusion in front of him until he could completely see what seemed to be a bright light in front of him, a light which was shielded by a pair of chocolate brown eyes and a worried face he knew far too well. “Mr Stark, are you ok?”

“Peter?” He didn’t sound sure about what to say, just one teenage-spider was in front of him, now, and his back was pushed against the cold pavement of his lab in the Avengers Tower, a news broadcasting buzzing from the screen in front of him. He shook his head, trying to understand what was going on. “Is that you? Is that the real you?!” 

“What? Yes,” And now Peter was looking at him with worried eyes while helping Tony stand. He looked around, trying to find any evidence of what happened and yet the only thing he could see was his lab and Peter. And the TV which he wasn’t sure when had been turned on. A moment later, whatever the anchorwoman was saying was replaced with footage from London of Peter and fishbowl face and… 

“Mysterio?” Tony couldn’t help but ask, to nobody in particular. 

“Do you know him?” Peter’s voice was weak and thin and Tony nodded, not looking at him but just letting the kid know he was listening. Whatever answer Stark was going to give was silenced by the man on the screen, revealing the entire world who was the person behind the Spider-Man mask.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, kudos and comments are appreciated!
> 
>  **wanna say hi?** come on tumblr [@myrxellabaratheon](http://myrxellabaratheon.tumblr.com/) and [@ironstrange-is-the-endgame](http://ironstrange-is-the-endgame.tumblr.com/)  
>  **do you want a fic written by me?** Click on my Ironstrange Tumblr and follow the instructions in the pinned post.


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